Episode 41: The Overwhelm Alarm: Stop Hitting Snooze on What Your Stress is Telling You
ITUNES | SPOTIFY
Feeling crushed by your mental load? In this eye-opening episode, I'm talking about the emotion every working mom knows all too well: overwhelm. But here's the twist – what if your overwhelm isn't the enemy, but actually a messenger who's trying to help you?
Like a muscle strain that reveals a deeper imbalance, your overwhelm is alerting you to something in your schedule that needs attention. Learn why pushing through and working more is only a temporary fix. When what you really need is a long-term solution. Discover practical strategies that have helped real working moms move from feeling constantly overwhelmed to taking control of their schedules and mental load. You'll hear specific examples of how to:
Address over-commitment at work before deadlines crash down
Share your mental load effectively with your partner
Create simple systems that eliminate decision fatigue
Stop feeling guilty about your overwhelm and start using it as the powerful tool it's meant to be. And if you want to learn the exact steps that I use to move out of overwhelm and address the real problem, join me for a free class on April 10 - Plenty of Time: 4 Simple Steps to Create More Space in Your Working Mom Schedule. Go to www.themothernurture.com/class to register.
links & resources mentioned in this episode:
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Hey there. I've got a quick question for you. Do you feel like there's never enough time to do all the things that you need to do as a working mom? If you're anything like my clients and a lot of the listeners I've been talking to, I'm guessing the answer is yes. No matter what you try from. Time blocking and turning off notifications to fancy planners or lists, full of color coded categories.
Nothing seems to really have an impact on how you feel about what you've accomplished at the end of each day. If you resonate with that, I've got something for you. I'm hosting a free live training called Plenty of Time, four Steps to Create More Space in Your Working Mom schedule.
During this training, I'm gonna walk you through exactly how to get things done in the time that you have, no matter what season of life you're in or how busy you are. It's happening on Thursday, April 10th at 12 noon Eastern, 9:00 AM Pacific. No complicated tools or that just double down mentality. This is just a simple, repeatable way to make progress on that never ending list and create more space in your schedule.
Go to the mother nurture.com/class to get all signed up. Again, that's the mother nurture.com/class. I can't wait to see you there.
You are listening to the Life Coach for Working Moms podcast, the show where we are talking about what it actually takes to make life work as a working mom. I'm your host, Katelyn Denning, a full time working mom of three and a certified life and executive coach. I'm so glad you're here and I hope you enjoy this week's episode.
Hello and welcome to episode 📍 41 of the podcast. I wanna get right into it today because we're talking about overwhelm. Overwhelm, and why. It's actually a good thing when you experience it. Hear me out. So as you can imagine. And I'm sure you can relate if you are a working mom listening to this podcast, overwhelm is one of the most used words that I see in applications for coaching.
In conversations, I see it in blog posts and articles and social media posts written about being a working mom. Now the definition of overwhelm, which I know the feeling. I like viscerally know what overwhelm feels like, but I had to look up the definition to just remind myself, and here's what I read. So overwhelm by definition means to upset, to overthrow, to cover completely, to overpower in thought or feeling.
I picture an image of a woman crushed by all of the things she's carrying, and I think especially all of the things she's carrying in her mental load. So she's maybe on the floor crushed by all of these thought bubbles that are just weighing down on her. Schedule that appointment. One says, research kids waking up at night with bad dreams.
Talk to the nanny about expectations. Do my pelvic floor exercises. Ask my friends for babysitter recommendations so I can then schedule a date with my husband. Do we need more diapers? Why is my milk supply so low lately? Should I be taking creatine? Am I getting enough protein? Insert all of the other thought bubbles that you have in your head.
Mine this morning was, oh, I forgot to get Tide at the store yesterday. It's not just about what we have to do, it's also what we are thinking about, and those thoughts are crushing at times. They are overpowering as you. I should know or hopefully know by now, I'm teaching a class later this week on how to create more space in your schedule.
But I feel a responsibility to clear something up with you here in case you are registered or you're thinking about attending. I am not going to be able to. Eliminate overwhelm for you from your life, even with more space in your schedule, even with the tools that I'm going to teach you about getting things done in the time that you have
we cannot completely eliminate overwhelm from our lives any coach or teacher who is promising you, that is deceiving you, it would be like a therapist promising to eliminate sadness from your life, or grief from your life, anger from your life. Those feelings, including overwhelm, are a part of the human experience.
They are foils to the times when we feel joy, gratitude, contentment, or confidence.
They are emotions. I can't not think about emotions and picture the cast of characters in inside out, if that has been your adult teacher as well about feelings. But they are all emotions. They're a part of life and you can give yourself permission to feel them. You're not doing anything wrong if you feel overwhelmed, but feeling overwhelmed more than not.
Staying in an overwhelmed state, that is a choice. The feelings come and go, but staying there being there more than you are not, there is a choice. And what I want you to understand from this episode, what I want you to walk away with is what to do when you feel overwhelmed.
I think overwhelm is meant to be a signal. Yes, it's an emotion, and we probably could agree that it's a negative emotion. It doesn't feel good. Like I said, I know exactly what it feels like because I do feel it still to this day. It feels to me like the sky is falling. Like the next thing that goes wrong in my day will unleash an avalanche of tears.
It feels a bit like loss of control, but it is meant to be a signal. Those tears, that loss of control, that sky is falling, feeling is an alert. It's a flashing red light. It's a smoke signal. That overwhelm has a really important message. Something isn't working. It's here to tell you that something isn't working.
And when you stay in overwhelm, you are ignoring that alarm. You are pressing the snooze button over and over again on the real problem. You're kicking the can down the road. Back when I was a runner, yes. I used to run actually quite a bit. , then I had three babies, and my pelvic floor isn't quite as strong as it used to be.
But back when I was a runner, I was at one point in my running days training for a half marathon. This was. After I moved to Cincinnati, there are a lot of hills here in Cincinnati. You have not truly trained until you have trained on our hills. Then we would go run these races in other cities where it was all flat and it felt like such a breeze.
But I had this persistent pain in my left knee. If you're a runner, I'm sure we've all had those aches and pains, the different parts that hurt when we run. And so I would ice it after longer runs. I would take ibuprofen to help with the swelling, and I would be okay for my next couple of runs. But then I'd go out and I'd do these hills and I do a long run and the pain would come back.
And it just wasn't truly going away. So I finally saw a physical therapist. I just wanted to be able to run again. I didn't wanna have this pain. I. And what that physical therapist taught me was so eye-opening. I had no idea. I actually needed to strengthen my hips and my glute muscles, particularly on the opposite side from where I was feeling the knee pain.
My right side. I had no idea I had weak glutes and hip muscles, but I have been overcompensating, especially on those hills for those weak muscles. And it was putting extra strain on my left knee, so it wasn't actually the knee that I needed to rehab. it was these other muscles I. Well, overwhelm is like that knee pain or that headache, or how your kids, if any of your kids have gone through or had lots of ear infections like mine have, right?
They all have that telltale sign. Some of mine have like tugged on their ear, waking up unexpectedly in the middle of the night. It's that sign where you're like, oh, an ear infection is coming or it's already here. These things are signs that there's something worth looking at, but when you just double down and try to get through the overwhelm by maybe staying up late or getting up early to work extra, maybe giving up on sleep or time with your family or time to take care of yourself so you can get a few more things done.
Or when your phone is out all of the time. 'cause you just wanna. Eliminate email so you can do all these other things that are piling up , and you think creating the overwhelm, you're just trying to get caught up. You might feel a little bit of relief by pushing through or doubling down or gripping harder once you get through that really tough week or you get that project off of your plate.
But really, you're just taking ibuprofen to reduce the swelling. Today, you're not actually addressing the issue. The strength imbalance and the overwhelm will keep coming back more and more frequently, and it will be louder and louder. But when you listen to overwhelm, when you feel it. When you give yourself permission to feel it and you think to yourself, what is really going on here?
Then you can make changes that will have a longer term impact. You can strengthen the other muscles that will make you stronger and less prone to injury or recurrence of the pain in the future. Maybe that looks like looking at all of the projects you have on your plate right now at work and addressing whether you can truly meet all those deadlines.
I had a client do this recently, and when she took a look and realized that she was over committed. She was able to proactively, before it was too late, go to her manager, show him the data, and together they came up with a plan that involved getting some support from other teammates, delegating and pushing out some deadlines on certain projects.
Maybe it looks like having a conversation with your partner about some of the things that are on your mental load. The household tasks, routines and chores, and how you can shake things up and divide things up. That is one of the first things that I do when I feel like the sky is falling. I make sure that my husband knows everything that is on my mind so we can see it and go through it together.
Maybe it looks like looking at your schedule. The meetings that you have, your commute times, how long things take, and making some adjustments or switching the order in which you do things. This is the first thing that we do in my time training and coaching program. Beyond balance, we time track for this exact reason.
It is always helpful to have a fresh outside set of eyes on this and can reduce overwhelm in the future. And maybe. Maybe this also looks like writing out some processes for yourself. I had a client recently who was feeling overwhelmed and behind at work because of these routine projects that she was just not motivated to do or felt like they were too hard, and so she was putting them off and creating overwhelm for herself.
So we decided to write them out. Like a checklist of the steps that she has to do every time, and now it's so much faster for her to get them done because she doesn't have to think. She just follows the list. In all of these examples, it takes a little time. Not much, but a little time to address the underlying issue.
Just like physical therapy exercises take a little time to rebuild the muscle or the strength. I can't tell you how many times I've helped clients fit PT exercises into their days. It is a very common homework item, but you always come back stronger. Now, that's not to say that another muscle or another weakness won't present itself later on, just like overwhelm won't be eliminated forever.
But when you feel it again in the future, as we all do, you know, you just have an opportunity here, you have an opportunity to listen to it. Maybe there's another issue that you didn't address the first time, and it'll be easier to spot because you've already eliminated one of them from the list of possibilities.
Or maybe your life has changed, your kids are in a new stage. The season has changed, and so your activities or schedule has changed. We have Maycember coming up, and I can guarantee many of you are going to feel overwhelmed or maybe something has changed in your relationship, in the support that you receive, or in your job, your work.
It makes so much sense that overwhelm would surface again here. That just means you're in a different stage now and there are new things to look at. So when you feel overwhelmed, you're not doing anything wrong. It is a normal and natural feeling that we all feel, but staying stuck in overwhelm is a choice.
And what I want you to do is see it instead as an opportunity. And take action to move beyond it. I'm actually teaching you the exact steps that you can use when you're ready to listen to that alert, that alarm that's going off in the form of overwhelm and instead of hitting snooze, know exactly what to do to get out of it and how to address the issue underneath.
The class is happening on Thursday, April 10th. It's called Plenty of Time for Simple Steps to Create More Space in Your Working Mom schedule. You can head to themothernurture.com/class to register the working moms who have enough time.
Who have even plenty of time for the things that they need and want to do in life. They still experience overwhelm from time to time, but the difference is they don't stay there. They see it as a sign and they take action to move past it and get back to a place where they feel in control of their time and how they spend it.
I want that for you too. All right. Again, head to themothernurture.com/class. Join me on Thursday, April 10th. I would love to see you there
and until the next episode, I hope you take care and I'll talk to you soon.
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